Just to warn you.

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Photo du jour

Romance, or a brief rendezvous, at the Coachella fairgrounds.

That wonderful time of year is fast arriving. When the music on the radio gets noticeably mellower, more anthemic. Layers of clothing are shed for tight-fitting basics, if clothes are opted for at all. The yard becomes part of the house once again, and outdoor-time is the best part of the day. When plans involve seeing new things and new places instead of family and familiar spaces. When time off is expected! Hoorah for spring! 

Calling Album of the Year, Nine Months Early?

Beach House's Teen Dream

*You might not be able to actually see the album cover 

Apologies for my long absence, been dealing with some major life changes (really, I'm not just sayin'). The tone, content and frequency of updates might be changing here now, as I still intend to invest myself into this project and, frankly, have few other places to write that aren't prone to getting lost (the internet is everywhere, how can you lose it!). Just a heads up, all two of you, heh. 

I'm going to the Coachella Music & Arts Festival this year after fantasizing about it for the better part of six years, and in preparation for it most of my musical endeavors have been specifically oriented around bands and artists that are slated to perform during that weekend in April. But even despite this, I think a lot of really superb stuff has already found its way into music stores (the physical type and virtually, mine being mostly of the latter) and it's looking like 2010 has already filled its quota in terms of innovative, expressive and infectious stuff to span the year and possibly the decade ahead. It just so happens that a lot of them have been tapped by the Coachella people. Buy your tickets if you develop any interest based on what I'm saying. 

While last year brought us some great innovative stuff from bands old (Dirty Projectors; Animal Collective) and new (The xx; St. Vincent), this year's best albums so far have charted their courses along familiar sonic territories. That's okay, as long as they sound like Massive Attack's Heligoland or Beach House's Teen Dream, which move and pose like both respective bands' previous albums but far more effortlessly and, in this case, hauntingly. Solid, classy stuff from bands that by now have earned the title of reliable, with new releases that still push against the boundaries of the niches they've already successfully carved out; they remain as interesting as ever. 

I look forward to hearing the new sounds of familiar bands as well, with Goldfrapp, MGMT, She & Him and Erykah Badu all set to drop new albums onto the masses in the next few months of so. 

What are you looking forward to?

Final Oscar Predictions

Anne Hathaway will be announcing the nominees bright and early tomorrow morning, so before we find out who the real runners are in each race, let's go through the major categories and place our bets if not beat some dead horses by repeating some of what is nearly set in stone for the ceremony itself. By this point, with most of the precursors having already transpired and gone into consideration in Academy votes (save for the Razzies and the BAFTAs which have at least disclosed their respective nominees), a short list of decided winners have emerged. But, then, this is the Oscars where simply getting nominated is an honor, so it's good exercise for our presaging skills, especially in the event that some upsets are pulled (like The Reader getting a Best Picture nomination over, say, The Dark Knight or Revolutionary Road). As we move closer to the night of the ceremony especially, things should get interesting as they have been these last few weeks with major guild awards going in different directions and diverging from the road that was once thought to be Avatar's inescapable warpath. Not that the tallies can change from now until the big night since votes have been cast already, but as we wade through reverberations that are still trembling through the industry in wait for their dissipation, clarity and certainty might actually also emerge. A lot can happen (notice that while critics have continued to pour their support on Meryl Streep, industry folk have been seduced by Sandra Bullock's keen strategy of playing to her strengths; critics don't vote in the Oscars despite having some amount of influence).

Best Picture (new rules, remember! ten nominees):
Avatar -- could win (Golden Globe)
The Hurt Locker -- could win / should win (DGA, PGA, BFCA)
Up in the Air -- could win (NBR)
Inglourious Basterds -- could win (SAG)
Precious
District 9
A Serious Man
An Education
Star Trek
Invictus
Alternates: (500) Days of Summer, The Hangover, A Single Man, Up

Best Director (looks like a showdown between exes Bigelow and Cameron):
James Cameron, Avatar -- could win (Golden Globe)
Kathryn Bigelow, The Hurt Locker -- could win / should win (DGA, BFCA)
Jason Reitman, Up in the Air
Quentin Tarantino, Inglourious Basterds -- should win
Lee Daniels, Precious
Alternates: Neill Blomkamp, District 9

Best Actor (it's Bridges' to lose, which is unlikely since the backlash has been minimal):
Jeremy Renner, The Hurt Locker -- should win
Colin Firth, A Single Man -- should win
Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart -- could win (SAG, BFCA)
George Clooney, Up in the Air (NBR)
Morgan Freeman, Invictus (NBR)
Alternates: Viggo Mortenson, The Road

Best Actress (the real race is Bullock vs. Streep, but a split can result in a third coming in to win):
Carey Mulligan, An Education -- could win / should win (NBR)
Sandra Bullock, The Blind Side -- could win (BFCA, SAG, Golden Globe)
Meryl Streep, Julie & Julia -- could win / should win (BFCA, Golden Globe)
Gabourey Sidibe, Precious
Helen Mirren, The Last Station
Alternates: Emily Blunt, The Young Victoria; Zoe Saldana, Avatar

Best Supporting Actor (now it's Waltz' to lose, but Harrelson delivered a knockout too):
Alfred Molina, An Education
Christopher Plummer, The Last Station
Stanley Tucci, The Lovely Bones
Woody Harrelson, The Messenger -- could win / should win (NBR)
Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds -- could win / should win (SAG, BFCA, Golden Globe)
Alternates: Matt Damon, Invictus; Anthony Mackie, Thr Hurt Locker; Christian McKay, Me and Orson Welles

Best Supporting Actress (once thought she'd shoot herself in the foot, it's now Mo'nique's for sure):
Mo'nique, Precious -- could win / should win (BFCA, SAG, Golden Globe)
Anna Kendrick, Up in the Air -- could win (NBR)
Julianne Moore, A Single Man -- should win
Vera Farmiga, Up in the Air
Melanie Laurent, Inglourious Basterds
Alternates: Penelop Cruz, Nine; Samantha Morton, The Messenger; Maggie Gyllenhaal, Crazy Heart

Best Original Screenplay (personally, as long as Avatar doesn't get nominated, I'm happy):
Inglourious Basterds -- could win / should win 
The Hurt Locker -- could win / should win
(500) Days of Summer
Up
A Serious Man
Alternates: Avatar, The Hangover, The Messenger

Best Adapted Screenplay (it's between Up in the Air and Precious, both based on novels):
An Education
Up in the Air -- could win / should win
District 9
Precious -- could win / should win
Julie & Julia
Alternates: In the Loop, Crazy Heart, Fantastic Mr. Fox

Best Animated Film (at one point I'd have said it's down to Fox, Coraline and Up, but now it's all Up):
Up -- could win / should win (Golden Globe, NBR, BFCA)
Fantastic Mr. Fox
Coraline -- should win
The Princess and the Frog
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
Alternates: Ponyo, 9

Best Documentary Film (that the mass-murdering of dolphins has simmered will help The Cove):
The Cove -- could win / should win (Golden Globe, BFCA, PGA, DGA)
Food, Inc. -- should win
The Beaches of Agnes
Facing Ali
Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country
Alternates: Valentino, Every Little Step, Under Our Skin

Best Foreign Film (it's down to France and Germany, but I'm sure Germany's Haneke will win):
A Prophet, France -- could win / should win
The White Ribbon, Germany -- could win / should win
Winter in Wartime, Netherlands
Samson & Delilah, Australia
The Secret in Their Eyes, Argentina
Alternates: Ajami, Israel; The World is Big, Bulgaria

These will be updated as soon as the nominations are broadcast and I'm awake and near a computer. I've got a pretty good feeling I'm close in each category, I'll mark them up in a different color so that we can all see exactly how close I was able to get.

Photo du jour

Will it do for tablets (and computers and e-readers...) what the iPhone has done for the cell phone?

Should've gone in a different direction with the name (sounds like an electronic feminine hygiene product), methinks, even though it's a logical choice to keep it related to the iPod. Brian Stelter of the New York Times gives apt reasoning for why the iPad is a risk for Apple: where the iPhone could more than adequately replace a cell phone, PDA, digital camera and music player, the iPad replaces... books? No one reads anymore anyways, books or newspapers, and we all know it'll never compete with even the lowest-end of the netbook market. So, I think I'll just stick to my iPod Touch and netbook combo.

Homo chic

Tom Wolfe is credited with coining the term 'radical-chic' which described that odd time and phenomena in the 60s and 70s where people, but especially the wealthy and bored, appropriated radical political identities and adopted extremists as friends because that was 'the thing to do' and kept them in the public eye. This is all accounted in his essay "The Radical Chic Party & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers" which describes a party that famed classical composer Leonard Bernstein held at his home to benefit the Black Panthers. Because these people possessed immense wealth and were untied to traditional citizenry due to their international jetsetting, David Denby later wrote in chronicling this social climate, they were thoroughly detached from the issues that plagued the rest of American society. They feared a downturn into irrelevance, no longer being the talk of the town. Recall that during the 60s and 70s political activism amongst youths was relatively high and that conversations around the water cooler tended to be more explicitly political and social, so the natural solution for boredom amongst the excessively wealthy was to embrace the behaviors of the youthful hipsters and take on their alternative lifestyles, albeit much less aggressively than their college-aged ilk, and with greater access to those making headway in this regard. Denby recounts this normalizing behavior by New York's upper crust elites mingling with an eclectic mix of East Coast leftist literati and radical activists like the Black Panthers. As always, social experiment becomes litmus test for social climate, and a surge in radical chic and faux-extremism trickled down to the masses, displacing the political activism that had previously emerged and thrived on campuses nationwide.

Now, years later, it seems as youths have regressed in their taste for politics (save for the 2008 presidential election which was more an exceptional case than an indication of a change in tides), they have at least applied their continued love for the alternative in subtler, similarly as reflexive and wholly as dangerous ways. David Denby, in writing about Tom Wolfe in his book Snark, was not making a simple reference to this phenomena but utilized it to discuss the epidemic-level rise of snark in his profession of journalism and criticism; their shared characteristics being the use of symbols and aesthetics to empower what is ultimately empty rhetoric, making an argument out of fluff, agitating for the sake of agitating. Play-acting. Dilettantism. Completely detached from the ideological tenets and grassroots efforts of the people they mimic, this sort of behavior at least propels their own individual standing within their social circles. In writing about snark, Denby only reveals how impressive its effects have become on the ways people, but especially youths, engage in everyday presentations of self.

Katy Perry kissed a girl. But does it matter? 

In surveying conversations that litter social networking sites I'm affiliated with and in reviewing the conduct of friends, acquaintances, co-workers, and family, it's apparent that a sort of trend has emerged that recalls Wolfe's radical chic, this time it's consolidated into a very specific set of behaviors that all belong to a spectrum of related identities. But, next to the performative aspects of radicalism, this new trend seeks to displace what is increasingly being recognized as a genetically-predetermined quality of selfhood. The kids nowadays are all a lot gayer. Of course, it goes without saying that the closet is moving in the direction of shrinkage, from a walk-in to a broom closet, and youths are feeling greater efficacy to come out, but given the bounty of publicity, even celebrity, that surrounds homoerotic behavior, it begs the question of whether or not to be gay is now the "in" thing to be. Could it be that all of today's musicians, actors and socialites really are gay or bisexual? It's nothing to get alarmed about, but it should arouse some suspicion. And, personally, I find it deceptive, disingenuous, and dangerous to real efforts to disintegrate barriers for LGBT rights and tolerance.

Where the Bernsteins of yesteryear were sporting Black Panther armbands and hosting dinners and where youths from not long ago donned Che Guevara tees and gear, today's hipsters are decked out in similar garb to Lady GaGa (who is invested in LGBT rights and spoke at a rally in Wasington D.C.) and openly discuss (exagerrate?) their bromances, their gaiety for outed celebrities, and pose in pictures for Facebook like they're in a Chi Chi Larue shoot.

I see youths' frivolous investment in homosexual identity via faux-homo behavior as a way of assuaging their guilt over homosexual erasure and phobias, curbing stereotypes for personal empowerment that ends ultimately in reaffirming those stereotypes, pushing the LGBT into niches of preconceived demeanor. Whether or not they share or sympathize with causes of the LGBT, they habitually perform stereotypical conduct to complicate their own previously defined and well-accepted identities, and display these things as a hermit crab does an empty container, to push upon social mores in a manner that exudes the alternative and suggests their liberation from taboo or gender stereotypes, although the effect is perpetuation. This effect arises when those who remain firmly opposed to homosexuality or LGBT rights, with or without a theoretical basis, encounter such widespread 'gaydom' and intensify their animosity, disdain, apathy or hatred. In the end, it's lose-lose: not only does the LGBT community have dilettantes in their ranks committing acts of gay-for-pay or gay-for-a-day with little thought of the repercussions, but those broadcasted signals that are intended for public reception also end in LGBT persons making connections that simply don't end up going anywhere. It's the ultimate in cock-blocking, and it's destroying every victory the community has achieved in opening those closet doors.  



R.J.M.

Photo du jour

What is the world like now without Conan O'Brien on television (save for re-runs)?

Me, I think it's unfortunate, and was entirely preventable. And I'm not taking to the idea of seeing Jay Leno back behind the Tonight Show desk.